Call for Papers for the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the IFTR World Congress in Melbourne, Australia, 6–10 July 2026

‘Nothing to be done’: What Samuel Beckett’s Theatre Does and What We Do with It

‘Rien à faire’ (Beckett, 1953: 11); ‘Nothing to be done’ (Beckett, 2010: 5). So sounds the first spoken line of Samuel Beckett’s first staged play, En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot. Taking their cue from Beckett’s characters, scholars have acknowledged the crucial importance of ‘the void’ at the centre of his oeuvre (Ross, 2011) by paying close attention to how figures in his work retreat into quietist sanctuaries from the world (Wimbush, 2020) or exploring the various manifestations and meanings of ‘nothing’ in his work (Caselli, 2010) and what this means for practitioners (Johnson, 2018). Yet, as productions of Beckett’s work in variously embodied arenas, medias and cultures of performance have repeatedly reminded us, it is not straightforward to create a purely nihilist interpretation of this theatre, or one that is separated from the world (Weller, 2005; Chakraborty and Vazquez, 2022). Beckett’s ‘nothings’ – however minimal – continue to say something, particularly in performance.

Responding to the IFTR World Congress’s self-reflective theme ‘What Theatre Does’, this year’s gathering of the Samuel Beckett Working Group invites scholars to engage with the ‘uses’ that Beckett’s work has been put to in performance (Felski, 2008) across various cultural and historical contexts. We encourage further thoughts on how Beckett’s creative ecology (Van Hulle, 2022) speaks to our present (McTighe, Thobois-Gupta, and Johnson, 2025), and we hope to collectively imagine what this work might do in the future, even as Beckett’s theatre ecosystems may reflect the foreshortening of these possible futures (McMullan, 2021). In recent years, Beckett’s work has helped to rethink what doing theatre means when his work is considered in the light of disability performance (Simpson, 2022); it has drawn attention to how teaching theatre might be rethought by bringing Beckett’s work into specific pedagogical environments (Johnson and Heron, 2020; Clabaut, 2024); and it has helped us to reflect on what participating in performance may now mean in the age of the author as a global brand (Pattie and Stewart, 2019). Beckett’s work continues to help us reflect anew on places that are too often considered ‘nonplaces’ for theatrical performance (Beckett, 2022), as the continuing tradition of political performances of his work behind bars attests to (Weiss, 2025).

Bearing in mind Beckett’s characterisation of his work as being aligned with ‘impotence, ignorance’ (qtd in Shenker, 1956: 3), the working group in Melbourne will investigate what Beckett’s theatre does when there is – apparently – ‘nothing to be done’.

Papers in French and in English may respond to the following, though submissions on any aspect of Beckett’s drama or Beckett in performance are welcome:

• How does Beckett ‘do’ theatre? What are his methods and practices of composing for performance?
• What does Beckett do in the theatre? What are the characteristics of Beckett the actor, the playwright, the director?
• What does the ‘Beckettian actor’ do? What (if anything) makes them a ‘Beckettian actor’?
• What is the place of Beckett’s work in theatre historiography, from modern theatre to postmodern dramaturgy?
• What does his work do across and between media?
• What are the politics of Beckett’s drama? How do artists engage politically with Beckett’s oeuvre?
• How do artists use, recycle and upcycle Beckett in the contemporary arts?
• How is Beckett’s oeuvre fertilised by other artistic ecosystems and how does Beckett’s work, in turn, generate further art-making?
• What are Beckettian pedagogies? What can Beckettian pedagogies do? How is Beckett generative as an epistemological lens?
• How does Beckett’s work enmesh itself with the local and the communal? What does it do and what can it do at that level?
• How is Beckett ‘used’ and ‘performed’ beyond the arts?
• Why Beckett?

As the IFTR is currently updating its online platform, submission details, including a link to the new platform, will be published in a later version of this CfP on our webpage: https://iftr.org/samuel-beckett/. 

The deadline for submission of abstracts is currently set to 8 December 2025 on the IFTR website. 

Papers of up to 3,000 words in length are to be distributed by 6 June 2026.

The Samuel Beckett Working Group is an evolving international community of researchers, which seeks to support the development of excellent research on Beckett’s drama and Beckett in performance. We welcome postgraduate and early-career researchers, as well as faculty, independent researchers and artists. We value the participation of Beckett and non-Beckett experts alike, as both categories partake in the maintenance of a healthy interdisciplinary ecosystem. The submission of work at various levels of development is encouraged from early ideas on a project to work in progress to nearly finished papers. This community strives to offer rigorous and constructive feedback through respectful engagement with each other’s work. Our core values are inclusivity, diversity and care.

If you have questions about the group or about attending please contact the working group convenors, James Little and Céline Thobois-Gupta, at sbwg.iftr@gmail.com.

Please note that papers to be presented at the Working Group are distributed and read by all the participants ahead of the meeting. At the Working Group sessions presenters give short résumés of their work, followed by a lengthy discussion period (each presenter has 30 to 45 minutes in all, depending on the number of presenters). This is an extremely effective method, which allows ideas to be discussed, debated and evaluated, with participants suggesting directions for the presenters’ work-in-progress. There is limited space for presenters; there will also be a limited space for auditors, who may also be sent the papers to read and be encouraged to engage in the discussions during the sessions.

Works cited

Beckett, Samuel (1953), En attendant Godot (Paris: Éditions de Minuit).

Beckett, Samuel (2010), Waiting for Godot, pref. by Mary Bryden (London: Faber and Faber).

Beckett, Samuel (2022), Beckett sa Chreig: Laethanta Sona, trans. by Mícheal Ó Chonghaile, dir. by Sarah-Jane Scaife (Inis Oírr: Company SJ).

Caselli, Daniela, ed. (2010), Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Chakraborty, Thirthankar, and Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez, eds (2022), Samuel Beckett as World Literature (London: Bloomsbury Academic).

Clabaut, Alice, dir. (2024), En attendant Monsieur Godot (Abbeville: Association Marie Brigitte), https://youtu.be/h3KOb9lfwpE?si=D6SVlq4VyHfn.

Felski, Rita (2008), The Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing).

Johnson, Nicholas (2018), ‘“Void cannot go:” Trauma and Actor Process in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett’, in Samuel Beckett and Trauma, ed. by Mariko Hori Tanaka, Yoshiki Tajiri and Michiko Tsushima (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 46–68.

Johnson, Nicholas, and Jonathan Heron, eds (2020), Pedagogical Issue, Journal of Beckett Studies 29, no. 1.

McMullan, Anna (2021), Beckett’s Intermedial Ecosystems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Ross, Ciaran (2011), The Art of Absence: Rethinking the Void (London: Palgrave Macmillan).

Shenker, Israel (1956), ‘Moody Man of Letters: A Portrait of Samuel Beckett, Author of the Puzzling Waiting for Godot’, New York Times, 6 May, ‘Section 2’: 1, 3.

Simpson, Hannah (2022), Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan).

Stewart, Paul and David Pattie, eds (2019), Pop Beckett: Intersections with Popular Culture (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag).

McTighe, Trish, Céline Thobois-Gupta, and Nicholas Johnson, eds (2025), Samuel Beckett and Ecology (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama).

Van Hulle, Dirk (2022), Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Weiss, Katherine (2025), ‘Performing Beckett for Incarcerated Women: Waiting for Godot at FCI Victorville, 10 December 2024’, The Beckett Review, 1.1 [online].

Weller, Shane (2005), A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (London: Legenda).

Wimbush, Andy (2020), Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag).